Climb Aboard!

Grab your eye patches and other favorite pirate swag to explore and plunder the scholastic seashores! Plunder! The Literacy EduGame is a series of five pirate-themed, educational videogames that engages learners to improve their literacy skills through a fun-learning experience. Each minigame represents an exploration for students. Plunder! is a web-based, supplemental aid that is used as a stand-alone tool or preferably alongside preexisting English Composition courses. Plunder! can also be used in summer school and after school classes to reinforce grammar lessons. Plunder! is designed to be a supplemental tool rather than a replacement for the curriculum.

The Plunder! EduGame Team consists of volunteer game designers, programmers, artists, animators, instructional designers, researchers and English Subject Matter Experts. Plunder! can be used by educators to "design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity" (NETS-T, 2008, para 3). The Plunder! EduGame Team strives to assist students to be equipped for high school success, college readiness and industry training programs according to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (2011).

There’s room on the deck if you’re interested in joining the crew of plundering pirates to continue supporting and building these minigames. Click on the interns, volunteers or sponsors tab for further details. Full Sail ahead mateys!

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Behind The Scenes

Balancing Fun & Learning

Plunder! is a collaborative effort between the EduGame Team that was started by Lester Frederick and the Serious Games Club that was founded by Chris Keeling. The overall objective for Plunder! is Fun-Learning. The reason for having a Fun-Learning objective is that research suggests that most digital educational games are either fun with little learning or educational but boring. Fun-Learning is the virtually elusive balance of the two. The challenging task is to engage students by the means of fun to get to the desired end, which is learning. “Clearly, educational video games remain controversial and somewhat challenging to implement, yet we may be closer to employing video games as part of innovative, student-centered language arts curricula” (Stevison & Kaplan, 2010, p. 165).